In 1930, Stalin declared: “In order to oust the ‘kulaks’ as a class, the resistance of this class must be smashed in open battle and it must be deprived of the productive sources of its existence and development. … That is a turn towards the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.”
This statement is very much in line with a Marxist framework. Note also that he just stated this – he did not have the power to make his word become law and I tracked the quote to an article Stalin wrote for a newspaper to correct an earlier article. It was literally an analysis and not party policy on kulaks.
Nevertheless, eliminating a class is entirely different from eliminating the people that make up that class. As social classes are a reflection of the material conditions and specifically the relationship to the means of production, if you change these relationships you will inevitably change the classes. Like how some nobles in feudal France became bourgeois and proto-capitalists around the time of the 1789 revolution.
Ukraine in 2021 should care more about their declining population (1/5th of it lost in total since 1990) than trying to keep alive the myth of a genocide 100 years ago from a country that does not exist any more.
This statement is very much in line with a Marxist framework. Note also that he just stated this – he did not have the power to make his word become law and I tracked the quote to an article Stalin wrote for a newspaper to correct an earlier article. It was literally an analysis and not party policy on kulaks.
Nevertheless, eliminating a class is entirely different from eliminating the people that make up that class. As social classes are a reflection of the material conditions and specifically the relationship to the means of production, if you change these relationships you will inevitably change the classes. Like how some nobles in feudal France became bourgeois and proto-capitalists around the time of the 1789 revolution.
Ukraine in 2021 should care more about their declining population (1/5th of it lost in total since 1990) than trying to keep alive the myth of a genocide 100 years ago from a country that does not exist any more.